Nozuko Mzamo says she noticed the problem years before she built a solution for it. Sitting in corporate boardrooms, she kept seeing opportunities that never made it to the young people who needed them most. That observation is what eventually became Ukiyo, a South African edtech company she founded formally in 2017, and now the force behind a new mobile platform called the Global Student Support Platform, or GSSP.
The app brings together scholarships, bursaries, internship listings, mentorship, accommodation, tutoring, wellness services, and career development tools, all in one place, and free for students to use. Ukiyo describes it as a marketplace for youth development, built to support a student from the moment they are looking for a place to study all the way through to landing their first job. The focus on students outside major urban centres is deliberate. GSSP is designed specifically to close the information gap that leaves young people in smaller towns and rural areas cut off from opportunities that their city peers take for granted.
The timing of the launch is hard to ignore. In the first quarter of 2026, youth unemployment among South Africans aged 15 to 24 sat at 60.90 percent. Around 3.9 million young people in that same age group are currently not in employment, education, or training. For Mzamo, the numbers point to a systems problem, not a motivation problem. "South Africa does not have a shortage of ambitious young people," she said in a statement. "It has a shortage of integrated pathways into economic participation."
Whether one app can move those numbers remains to be seen, but GSSP is now live and the students are already there waiting.
Originally published by TechCabal.